Presence in Absence
William Collier, in a comment on a post below, refers to an extraordinary article in Time Magazine by David Van Biema on Mother Teresa’s prolonged “dark night of the soul.”
The article is based upon a new book of Mother Teresa’s Letters:
A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light
(Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and
her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the
spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The
letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested
that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that
for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of
God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian
Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”
Van Biema continues:
The book is hardly the work of some antireligious investigative
reporter who Dumpster-dived for Teresa’s correspondence. Kolodiejchuk,
a senior Missionaries of Charity member, is her postulator, responsible
for petitioning for her sainthood and collecting the supporting
materials. (Thus far she has been beatified; the next step is
canonization.) The letters in the book were gathered as part of that
process.
The church anticipates spiritually fallow periods. Indeed, the Spanish
mystic St. John of the Cross in the 16th century coined the term the
“dark night” of the soul to describe a characteristic stage in the
growth of some spiritual masters. Teresa’s may be the most extensive
such case on record. (The “dark night” of the 18th century mystic St.
Paul of the Cross lasted 45 years; he ultimately recovered.) Yet
Kolodiejchuk sees it in St. John’s context, as darkness within faith.
Teresa found ways, starting in the early 1960s, to live with it and
abandoned neither her belief nor her work. Kolodiejchuk produced the
book as proof of the faith-filled perseverance that he sees as her most
spiritually heroic act.
Teresa’s spiritual agony and its partial resolution are suggested:
There are two responses to trauma: to hold onto it in all its vividness
and remain its captive, or without necessarily “conquering” it, to
gradually integrate it into the day-by-day. After more than a decade of
open-wound agony, Teresa seems to have begun regaining her spiritual
equilibrium with the help of a particularly perceptive adviser. The
Rev. Joseph Neuner, whom she met in the late 1950s and confided in
somewhat later, was already a well-known theologian, and when she
turned to him with her “darkness,” he seems to have told her the three
things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that
is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling
Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving
for God was a “sure sign” of his “hidden presence” in her life; and
that the absence was in fact part of the “spiritual side” of her work
for Jesus.
This counsel clearly granted Teresa a tremendous sense of release.
For all that she had expected and even craved to share in Christ’s
Passion, she had not anticipated that she might recapitulate the
particular moment on the Cross when he asks, “My God, My God, why have
you forsaken me?” The idea that rather than a nihilistic vacuum, his
felt absence might be the ordeal she had prayed for, that her
perseverance in its face might echo his faith unto death on the Cross,
that it might indeed be a grace, enhancing the efficacy of her calling,
made sense of her pain. Neuner would later write, “It was the redeeming
experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart
was the special share she had in Jesus’ passion.” And she thanked
Neuner profusely: “I can’t express in words — the gratitude I owe you
for your kindness to me — for the first time in … years — I have come
to love the darkness. “
The whole article deserves careful attention. Clearly the book (which I have not yet read) is an important one, perhaps a new classic of spirituality. When Matthew Lamb and James Martin reach common ground on a book’s significance, it’s time to take notice.
Wow, that’s not my father’s Time Magazine. It isn’t the magazine that published young Thomas Merton’s letter to the editor that began, “Ordinarily I hate TIME…” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765253-5,00.html
This is one terrific article.
I guess Mother Teresa was asking for it when she named herself after St. Therese of Lisieux, widely known as the bourgeois Norman ultramontane “little flower” but in reality a tough fighter. From the age of 17, nothing but St. John of the Cross and Scripture could mean anything to Therese for spiritual reading, and on her deathbed she suffered a year and a half of absolute spiritual darkness, hinted at in Manuscript C of The Story of a Soul, and more explicitly described in her Last Conversations.
It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, this spiritual purification. It manifests God’s faithfulness, in that God wants those who are faithful to Him to be freed from illusions. It exercises the theological virtues, expanding the person’s capacity for God, and likewise his/ her availability for the enjoyment of heavenly goods. Most marvelously, it allows a sharing in the saving activity of Christ: it is a specifically apostolic suffering, something that St. Paul knew as well: “In my own flesh I make up whatever is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.”
I saw a report on this book yesterday evening on the national news. I look forward to reading it. At this point, may I make one small pedantic point: John of the Cross never uses the term “dark night of the soul.” In his treatise simply called “Dark Night” he distinguishes the dark night of the senses and the dark night of faith. In the latter category he means the spiritual senses. Based on what Bob Imbelli has put up, this seems to me to be a classic case of the passage through the dark night. John spent so much time on this theme because bad spiritual teachers often mistook such experiences for what he called “melancholy” or, worse, lack of faith. This publication may given us a textbook example of what John was talking about.
I suppose we have to reserve judgment until we read the book (which I look forward to doing), but my first thought is that I don’t know how we can reconcile the experience of Teresa with many of the words of Jesus, such as, “And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” Or, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
And I have to ask if we weren’t deceived by Teresa’s public persona.
I’m so glad Fr. Imbelli posted this. Last night’s news report about Mother Teresa reminds us all that belief is not something we control. Our old priest used to tell us in RCIA that there would be lots of times we felt we didn’t believe, and that it the challenge was to still act as if we did, even in the dark.
Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), this was one of the chief ways in which Unitarianism prepared me to be a Catholic–in our fellowship, the story of Christ was presented more or less as a “what if it WERE true” exercise. That is, belief in the divinity of Jesus aside (something most Unitarians don’t buy into in any kind of traditional way), what if we were to live our lives as Jesus taught? What could we possibly lose?
The Unitarians insisted that if God knows all, God knows exactly what we do or don’t believe. It freed us from pretending and feeling like hypocrites. It’s the effort we make to live Godly lives, even in our moments of doubt, and perhaps MOST in our moments of doubt, that count.
And what sometimes happens is that belief sneaks up on you when you do try to live it. Belief and action are inextricable. This is something not all Protestants “get” when they emphasize correctness of belief.
Respectfully to David Nickol, Mother Teresa sought and she WAS given. She was given the strength to continue her mission despite her doubts. And Christ came to her, in the form of her spiritual advisor, and showed her how to bear her burden without it crushing her.
I think what Mother Teresa’s experience might also teach us is that some of us aren’t going to come out of the dark. And that’s OK. It should expand our notion of salvation and faith.
David, [what Jean said, and]:
It is clear, consequently, how God grants the soul a favor by cleansing and curing it. He cleanses it with a strong lye and a bitter purge in its sensory and spiritual parts of all imperfect affections and habits relative to temporal, natural, sensory, and spiritual things. He does this by darkening the interior faculties and emptying them of all these objects, and by restraining and drying up the sensory and spiritual affections, and by weakening and refining the natural forces of the soul with respect to these things. A person would never have been able to accomplish this work alone, as we shall soon explain. Accordingly, God makes the soul die to all that he is not, so that when it is stripped and flayed of its old skin, he may clothe it anew.
Its youth is renewed like the eagle’s [Ps.103:5], clothed in the new self, which is created, as the Apostle says, according to God [Eph. 4:24].
This renovation illumines the human intellect with supernatural light so it becomes divine, united with the divine; informs the will with love of God so it is no longer less than divine and loves in no other way than divinely, united and made one with the divine will and love; and is also a divine conversion and changing of the memory, the affections, and the appetites according to God. And thus this soul will be a soul of heaven, heavenly and more divine than human.
As we have gradually seen, God accomplishes all this work in the soul by illumining it and firing it divinely with urgent longings for God alone. Rightly and reasonably does the soul add the third verse of the stanza:
-Ah, the sheer grace! –
The Dark Night, Book II, 13, 11
I don’t want to say too much more before reading the book, but I find this a devastating revelation. And if answers and explanations are so obvious and easy, why did Mother Teresa herself have such a tremendous struggle, apparently her entire life?
David, I think that the Gospel verses you mentioned must be tempered with others, many of which mention the cross, poverty of spirit, and the narrow way.
On the other hand, it’s significant that Therese only spoke about her experiences in a guarded way, and usually not at all. One only receives hints of her struggles. She thought that an open discussion would tempt others in the same way that she was being tempted.
It is one thing to talk about dark nights, and to be able to quote the classics about them, and quite another to undergo one. For some it is a darkness that not even the wisdom and holiness of the great saints can penetrate. Talk to anyone who has suffered from depression (which I am not identify9ng or even associating with the dark night), and you’ll find out that the problem isn’t reason or argument.
So David, use your experience of devastation to appreciate what she must have felt.
If she had this awful problem of realizing (making real to herself) the presence of a loving God, she seems to have had no difficulty in recognizing the presence of Christ in the poor and abandoned–and by that recognition she herself became a presence of God to them.
And let us not forget the great distress and trouble that Jesus experienced in the Garden, and his cry of abandonment on the Cross–his great “Why?”
Fr. Komonchak:
Reason and argument are precisely what helped Mother Teresa accept her struggles.
“…He seems to have told her the three things she needed to hear: that there was no human remedy for it (that is, she should not feel responsible for affecting it); that feeling Jesus is not the only proof of his being there, and her very craving for God was a “sure sign” of his “hidden presence” in her life; and that the absence was in fact part of the “spiritual side” of her work for Jesus. ”
What really seems to be important in these cases is to be told, from the outside, that the doubt and fear and seemingly blasphemous thoughts are not offensive to God.
Kathy:
Reason and argument take you only so far. Dark nights are not the result of syllogisms, and they are not lifted by syllogisms, as apparently it was not in Mother Teresa’s case.
Syllogisms aren’t the only kind of reasoning (although they are darn satisfying).
The dark night is very confusing, not just on a personally emotional level of devastation (although there is that) but also because God seems to be self-contradictory. “This is what causes my grief: that the way of the Most High has changed.” “Why are you cast down, my soul, why groan within me? Hope in God; I will praise him still, my savior and my God.”
So is God good, or not? “Is he Lord in our midst, or not?” Ask that question wrongly, and it’s the day of Massah in the desert. Ask it in faith, and it’s redemptive for the life of the world. So it’s a good time to get all the good advice you can.
I think the relationship between a dark night and depression is something that only an experienced and wise spiritual director, working in conjunction with a psychiatrist open to faith, would be able to sort out. It’s the flip side of the relationship between demonic possession and other forms of mental illness.
Maybe the reason Mother Theresa didn’t mention this was also to avoid a perverse kind of bragging.
Larry Cunningham, this is your sphere. Isn’t it true that the Church has traditionally taught that dark nights aren’t something that are commonly experienced by the spiritually immature, or those weak in faith? Your typical twenty year old college student in coming in with a crisis of faith–a sense of God’s absence–isn’t’ likely to be to told she or he has a dark night.
This is the tough stuff.
May I confess that I’m in awe of all those who work through the ‘dark night” that Mother Theresa speaks of. I recognize that great souls have not infrequently reported having to make this journey. For myself, I am scared of it. Not being even remotely a great soul, I’m probably safe from having to undergo it. It’s hard for me not to feel relieved by this.
Sometime last fall Fr. Komonchak mentioned a book by Dom Aelred Squire called “Asking the Fathers.” It’s a great book, but also scary for chickens like me.
Bernard, yes. Me too.
As Prof. Cunningham mentioned, there is more than one night. Bl. Teresa was evidently given the grace of the night of the spirit, which St. John calls “terrifying”–and a “sheer grace.”
One of the terrifying aspects of this night (again following sanjuanist theology) is that the landmarks are few. Here, the spirit is being purified, the unrepeatable created being.
To my knowledge, St. John doesn’t give clear marks for the spiritual director to discern how the person proceeds through the last night. But in the Ascent of Mt. Carmel Book 2 Ch. 13, John gives a 3-point checklist for the first night, in which the soul is drawn by God from meditation into contemplation. Note that paragraph 6 distinguishes this night from depression. Sorry for the archaic (Peers) translation:
“In order that there may be no confusion in this instruction it will be meet in this chapter to explain at what time and season it behoves the spiritual person to lay aside the task of discursive meditation as carried on through the imaginations and forms and figures above mentioned, in order that he may lay them aside neither sooner nor later than when the Spirit bids him; for, although it is meet for him to lay them aside at the proper time in order that he may journey to God and not be hindered by them, it is no less needful for him not to lay aside the said imaginative meditation before the proper time lest he should turn backward. For, although the apprehensions of these faculties serve not as proximate means of union to the proficient, they serve nevertheless as remote means to beginners in order to dispose and habituate the spirit to spirituality by means of sense, and in order to void the sense, in the meantime, of all the other low forms and images, temporal, worldly and natural. We shall therefore speak here of certain signs and examples which the spiritual person will find in himself, whereby he may know whether or not it will be meet for him to lay them aside at this season.
2. The first sign is his realization that he can no longer meditate or reason with his imagination, neither can take pleasure therein as he was wont to do aforetime; he rather finds aridity in that which aforetime was wont to captivate his senses and to bring him sweetness. But, for as long as he finds sweetness in meditation, and is able to reason, he should not abandon this, save when his soul is led into the peace and quietness which is described under the third head.
3. The second sign is a realization that he has no desire to fix his mediation or his sense upon other particular objects, exterior or interior. I do not mean that the imagination neither comes nor goes (for even at times of deep recollection it is apt to move freely), but that the soul has no pleasure in fixing it of set purpose upon other objects.
4. The third and surest sign is that the soul takes pleasure in being alone, and waits with loving attentiveness upon God, without making any particular meditation, in inward peace and quietness and rest, and without acts and exercises of the faculties — memory, understanding and will — at least, without discursive acts, that is, without passing from one thing to another; the soul is alone, with an attentiveness and a knowledge, general and loving, as we said, but without any particular understanding, and adverting not to that which it is contemplating.
5. These three signs, at least, the spiritual person must observe in himself, all together, before he can venture safely to abandon the state of meditation and sense, and to enter that of contemplation and spirit.
6. And it suffices not for a man to have the first alone without the second, for it might be that the reason for his being unable to imagine and meditate upon the things of God, as he did aforetime, was distraction on his part and lack of diligence; for the which cause he must observe in himself the second likewise, which is the absence of inclination or desire to think upon other things; for, when the inability to fix the imagination and sense upon the things of God proceeds from distraction or lukewarmness, the soul then has the desire and inclination to fix it upon other and different things, which lead it thence altogether. Neither does it suffice that he should observe in himself the first and second signs, if he observe not likewise, together with these, the third; for, although he observe his inability to reason and think upon the things of God, and likewise his distaste for thinking upon other and different things, this might proceed from melancholy or from some other kind of humour in the brain or the heart, which habitually produces a certain absorption and suspension of the senses, causing the soul to think not at all, nor to desire or be inclined to think, but rather to remain in that pleasant state of reverie.Against this must be set the third sign, which is loving attentiveness and knowledge, in peace, etc., as we have said.
7. It is true, however, that, when this condition first begins, the soul is hardly aware of this loving knowledge, and that for two reasons. First, this loving knowledge is apt at the beginning to be very subtle and delicate, and almost imperceptible to the senses. Secondly, when the soul has been accustomed to that other exercise of meditation, which is wholly perceptible, it is unaware, and hardly conscious, of this other new and imperceptible condition, which is purely spiritual; especially when, not understanding it, the soul allows not itself to rest in it, but strives after the former, which is more readily perceptible; so that abundant though the loving interior peace may be, the soul has no opportunity of experiencing and enjoying it. But the more accustomed the soul grows to this, by allowing itself to rest, the more it will grow therein and the more conscious it will become of that loving general knowledge of God, in which it has greater enjoyment than in aught else, since this knowledge causes it peace, rest, pleasure and delight without labour.”
An excellent, accessible personal/ pastoral resource regarding the first night is Thomas H. Green, SJ, When the Well Runs Dry.
I am just wondering what we are to make of various people’s experiences and interpretations of the perceived presense or absence of God. I remember when our parish (in middle or late 1960s) went on a campaign to get parishoners to tithe. We got all kinds of stories from the pulpit along the lines of “they needed an expensive new furnace, but when they started tithing, the old furnace began working perfectly!!! Tithing actually saved them money!”
I ran across a story about the troubled housing market at Marketwatch.com today with this link in it:
http://stjosephstatue.com/letters.mv
It’s letters from people who believe that burying a statue of St. Joseph in their yard miraculously enabled them to sell their houses when nothing else was working.
Does God really make His presence known to some people by fixing their toasters and withhold it from others for most or all of their lives to purify their souls?
David, St. John of the Cross (again, sorry) would say that even if someone is really, really sure that St. Joseph helped score an excellent house sale, they should just not worry about it. It’s not significant in itself. The important thing is to keep moving forward without getting bogged down with phenomena.
The same attitude applies to visions and other mystical phenomena. If God wants to do something salvific, that benefit will be given without being attentive to the feelings, etc., that accompany the gift of grace. One reason for this (among many) is that hope cannot expand if we hold on to memories of old graces. We will want all the new graces to conform somehow with the old, and God wants us to be ready for the new.
I wish I could find a good exegesis of “fear” in the gospels. Jesus contrasts fear with trust (that is, faith). So it would seem that the feeling of fear is the opposite of faith. I’ve heard this preached. But I doubt it’s quite right, particularly since, as Fr. Komonchak mentioned above, the Lord knew fear himself in the Garden.
Did Therese only speak in a guarded way, as Kathy suggests? Her statement about prospects of the next life appearing only as a black cliff blocking out all light (or words to that effect) were certainly not guarded. Her documents were bowdlerized by early editors, and Mother Teresa seems to have done her own self-bowdlerization. Perhaps part of the pain she suffered came from a clash between her actual religious experience and the ideologically driven public projections. She could not, it seems, admit uncertainty about anything, in public. Had she done so, the Vatican would have dropped her like hot bricks, or even issued a monitum against her.
Most of us get by most of the time without any terribly vivid sense of the presence of God. But if that became positive antipathy to prayers, a constant sense that the liturgy was meaningless, this could surely not be taken as a mystical grace.
I suggest that commonsense psychology be applied here, rather than constantly reaching for mystical high notes.
Teresa was probably a quite simple woman, assured that she could live her problems in the shadow of the Croos, and I do not wish to impugn the heroism and nobility of this.
But there seems to be a touch of “spin” in dressing up these perhaps quite ordinary difficulties as mystical voyages.
David Nickol wrote: “They needed an expensive new furnace, but when they started tithing, the old furnace began working perfectly!!! Tithing actually saved them money!”
Jean replies: Hoo boy. I loved my mother-in-law, but she was full of “miracle” stories like this. Like the time she rescued a stray dog, found it’s owner, and, lo! The reward money JUST HAPPENED to be the EXACT amount neede for HER dog’s operation!
Well, of course it was, because when the stray dog owner came to collect her dog, Ma told her a sad sad story about how her little dog needed an operation that cost $50 and the owner felt guilt-tripped into coughing up the dough.
The only point I tried to make above is that you can’t always get what you want from God, but if you pay attention, you sometimes you end up with what you need.
But who among us, watching a dying parent, a sick child, the nightly news or balancing the checkbook doesn’t feel that the Almighty could be doing a lot more to strengthen our faith? Whatever we think we might be getting from God sometimes seemps pretty parsimonious.
I can only hope Mother’s joy is the greater in heaven (on the days I’m sure there IS a heaven) for having doubted it here.
I just can’t help finding Mother Teresa’s situation to be, at heart, very joyful. God wants the good of the person, and good involves purification.
Tomorrow’s second reading talks about this in a way that addresses human sorrow on every level: endure the discipline as though a loving father were disciplining his child. Why? So one day it will be possible to enjoy “the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”
While I am mildly sympathetic to O’Leary’s warning against “mystical voyages” and would resist applying John of the Cross tout court to the situation of Mother Teresa I do think that that one must pay attntion to her persistence in doing what she saw as the Lord’s work – perseverance is, in itself, a profound form of faith and an exigent form of caritas – sheer love for others. That being said, there is some instruction in the writings of John of the Cross in his insistence that the path to union with God may require a “letting go” of easy consolations, the epiphenoma of so-called “mystical” experiences (John is recorded to have said that he would not walk across the street to see a stigmatic), and other warm fuzzies that we demand of prayer.
As for Cathleen Kaveny’s query: some students are anguished about their lack of faith and/or deadened expeirence in prayer but often, in such cases, what is, in reality happening, is that they are maturing intellectually and sloughing off adolescent imaginings aobut faith – Saint Paul, as we know, has perceptive things to say about this in First Cornthians.
Sorry to natter on – this is an interesting topic and thanks to Joe K. for reminding us of the terrible sonnets of Hopkins.